[climacs-devel] Latest Progress

[John Q]

Dear list-members,

This is the semi-annual [ahem - must do better...]
update on progress for those who don't follow
climacs-cvs closely.

Since the last report there have been a number of
developments, not the least of which are reports of
actual users who are not also climacs developers. This
has come about partly as a result of Dwight Holman's
clim-desktop project, which enables users to build an
image containing an integrated set of clim-based
applications, including, of course, climacs. The other
parts of clim-desktop are Clouseau (an inspector), the
Listener, a debugger, Closure (a web browser), Beirc
(an IRC client) and Swine, which extends climacs to
use swank (the Slime backend) to provide some
slime-like functionality.

Clim-desktop adds the following commands and
functionality:

  Eval Last Expression C-c C-e
  Macroexpand 1 C-c C-m
  Macroexpand All C-c M-m
  Eval Region C-c C-r
  Compile Definition C-c C-c
  Compile And Load File C-c C-k
  Compile File C-c M-k
  Edit Definition M-.
  Return From Definition M-,
(together with compiler note and cross reference
display and navigation)
  Hyperspec Lookup C-c C-d h
(using Closure)
  Arglist Lookup C-c C-d a
  Swine Completion M-Tab
  Swine Fuzzy Completion C-c M-i
(arglists shown in minibuffer on #\Space)
  Inspect Buffer C-c C-d C-b
  Inspect Window C-c C-d C-w
(using Clouseau)

And, of course, COMMON-LISP:ED will open climacs!

Other user-visible changes to climacs include:

* Mouse left-click positions the cursor, right-click
copies, and middle-click pastes

* Describe Key Briefly C-h c, Where Is C-h w, Describe
Bindings C-h b

* Splitting and resizing windows is prettier (Dwight
Holman again)

* The package of a lisp file is detected and displayed
in the info-pane

* The beginnings of a User Manual (Robert Strandh)

And Marcus Pearce has added significant functionality
by tying together Christophe Rhodes' prolog-sytax to
his (Christophe's) paiprolog, an expansion and
ISOfication of the sexp-based Prolog from Norvig's
'Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming'
(PAIP).

Behind the scenes there was a proliferation of
command-tables and command-containing files,
Christophe and David Lewis helped implement per-syntax
commands, and Max-Gerd Retzlaff tidied up some
pathname and pane-naming issues.

In terms of infrastructure, the refactoring of certain
functionality into the ESA ('Emacs Style Application')
system seems to have worked, with ESA now being used
in Gsharp and newcomer Ftd; Aleksandar Bakic (with the
assistance of Derek Peschel) continued his work on
cl-automaton.

As to future directions Creighton Hogg will be
progressively adding documentation to the commands
in-program, and Nicholas Sceaux is working on the
abstraction of the LR-parser functionality used in
lisp-syntax.

So this announcement marks the point at which climacs
became genuinely useful to lisp developers: Robert
reports that developing Gsharp in climacs (using
clim-desktop) is a real pleasure, not least because,
being lisp all the way down, nits in the development
environment are only a M-., edit and C-c C-c away from
being fixed. There is still a long way to go (and it
is the essence of a programmable development
environment that it is never finished), but future is
looking good.

Best regards,
JQS


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